WHAT A HACK! Marilyn Franklin shows the outcome of Dr. Robert Cattani’s 2009 handiwork.Angel Chevrestt

Despite more than 40 malpractice suits against him, Cattani continues to lead the high life with wife Patricia. (Debbie Schatz / Palm Beach Daily News)

He’s accused of being the Richmond County ripper.

Staten Island cosmetic surgeon Robert Cattani has been sued for malpractice more than 40 times over three decades, but the state Health Department did nothing to stop the doctor while patients were being maimed and disfigured.

Cattani performed an eyelid lift that blinded a preschool teacher in one eye in 2005, and a tummy tuck on another patient that resulted in life-threatening blood loss, according to state and court records.

In the 2010 tummy-tuck surgery, he is accused of preventing EMS from helping the man, who was eventually taken to a hospital with impending kidney failure. Another patient suffered a perforated bowel during a 2007 liposuction, state records show.

Despite complaints to the state Office of Professional Medical Conduct dating back to at least 2003, Cattani kept practicing at his main office on Staten Island and in offices in Manhattan and on Long Island.

Staten Islander Marilyn Franklin had no idea of Cattani’s poor medical record when she went to his Pavilion for Cosmetic Surgery in 2009 to fix her “turkey neck.”

“I went in one way to get something corrected,” Franklin said. “Truthfully, I felt I came out looking like the Bride of Frankenstein.”

She said the lower face and neck lift resulted in thick scars so painful that they keep her awake at night. She has sued Cattani for malpractice.

Lawyer Robert Danzi, who represented the woman robbed of sight in one eye, said the state and Cattani’s fellow doctors failed to stem the bloodletting.

“Where was the policing in this?” Danzi said. “He hurt a lot of people.”

Arthur Levin, head of the Center for Medical Consumers, said authorities missed warning signs.

“At least as far as we know, it seems like an open-and-shut case of somebody who should not be practicing plastic surgery, or maybe not even medicine,” Levin said.

“Why is it so difficult to shut them down?”

State Health Commissioner Nirav Shah did not act until this month, when he suspended Cattani’s license, saying his practice “constitutes an imminent danger to [the] health of the people of this state,” according to a state order.

The state Health Department says all complaints to the disciplinary board “go through a stringent review process and, if appropriate, a formal hearing process, as well.”

A hearing on the Cattani allegations is continuing before the disciplinary board, and could result in him permanently losing his license.

The money Cattani made from boob jobs and hair transplants allowed him to live the high life in a 12,000-square-foot Lloyd Harbor home on Long Island. He spent winters in Palm Beach, Fla.

But he has racked up a trail of debt. His longtime accountants sued him for about $100,000 in unpaid bills, and the IRS filed a $9,641 tax lien against him last year.

“Dr. Cattani, a respected and experienced cosmetic surgeon, looks forward to the opportunity to defend himself, as well as to his ultimate vindication,” said his lawyer, Raymond Belair.

Belair said many of the malpractice claims against Cattani were “rejected, abandoned or dismissed” and that the allegations in the state charges “include many such inevitable complications.”